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Peer Review

These days, there is a simple way of gauging the value of a piece of research: Is is published in a prestigious peer-reviewed (English language) journal or not?

If it is, then it is valid, frontier-breaking research worthy of support.

If it’s not – say, if you have written a book or – the horror! – an article in your native language – then it’s worthless.

It’s either-or: To politicians and bureaucrats, and as a consequence also to academics, there are no in-betweens.

But what if research is published in prestigious peer-reviewed English language journals that is … shall we say … statistically challenged? (I did qualitative work during my academic career, but I’m agnostic to the qualitative/quantitative science religion wars and I think you should respect a carefully prepared statistical criticism of all kinds of conclusions).

What quality problems are there in the peer-review process?

As a former methods teacher, I would also like to draw attention to the question: What validity and reliability problems are there in the rankings that have become so popular both within the academic community and the research policy community?

And are peer-reviewed commercial journals really the optimal way to distribute research these days? Let’s face it: University libraries have a huge problem financing subscriptions while we pretend to live in the age of the internet.